I have written often about Lise Davidsen in this series, most recently on her Isolde last season, and can only say of the present performance that if there is one role in the international canonical repertory to which the conformation of her voice and temperament is almost prohibitively unsuited, it is Lady Macbeth. The voice’s structure, with its ample, freely released top (though always of the same coloration, regardless of the aesthetic and dramatic content of its setting) and progressively narrowing presence from the upper-middle F on down, so that the entire mid-to-low stretch of her range has only a bare, skeletal presence that is of almost no operatic use, is a sharp-angled misfit with Verdi’s setting. So is her dispassionate, matter-of-fact physical presence and almost abstract treatment of vocal interpretation. She makes her way through the florid, ornamental aspects of the writing, and with a nicely taken pp D-flat on that final phrase, but without any feel of musical or emotional release. The cosmic black hole that now constitutes the dramatic soprano category, coupled with the financial desperation of opera’s leading institutions (including what remains of the classical recording industry) and her own ambition and misjudgments, finds her installed as a trans-repertory star and exemplar for young devotees and aspiring singers. The standard has fallen that far.

As we often find with male roles in relation to their female counterparts, that of Macbeth is comparatively short in compass. It avoids the low extension altogether (anything below B), and at the top requires expert handling under a broad range of dynamic and expressive conditions in the registrational borderland at E and F, but very rarely extends beyond that (only two Gs are written, one a cut-off scream in the Cavern Scene (“Muori, fatal progenie!“) and the other a very well set-up ascent on “O la vitto-o-O-ria!” as Macbeth marshals his forces for the final battle.^(I) However, the sheer length of the role and its inflectional span, from the declamatory Dagger Soliloquy to the almost parlando sotto voce exchanges with Lady M. to the expansive cantabile mode of the duettino with Banquo (near the beginning) and the great aria “Pietà, rispetto, amore” (near the end) make for an assignment that is, in its way, as challenging as the soprano’s.

Among the voices on the Met roster in recent years, Quinn Kelsey’s is the one best matched to the major Verdi roles. It hasn’t quite the size or coloristic breadth claimed by the American baritones who sang those parts from the 1930s through the ’70s (Tibbett, Warren, Merrill, MacNeil, Milnes), and is therefore better suited to the more lyrical side of that repertory than to the heaviest dramatic parts. But it has sufficient strength and timbral rightness to add up to a successful Macbeth, if handled with technical shrewdness and interpretive imagination. When, all too rarely, Kelsey lets his voice follow its natural singing course, the results are good, and those infrequent, brief excursions above F release persuasively. But it was deflating to hear that some of the habits that plagued his Ballo Renato three years ago (see “Ballo Sneaks Back In, Pt. 2,” 11/13/23) seem to have entrenched themselves. One is his resort to straight tone combined with overly opened vowels, not in moments of dramatic stress, but in phrases of pure legato formation. He applies this device whenever real singing is inconvenient, as when dragging the voice up from middle C into the passaggio notes. In the Ballo article, I cited the example of the ascent to the F on “sul mio se-e-e-NO” in “Eri tu;” here, we encounter it immediately on an almost identical phrase, “Alla corona che m’offre il fato” in the “Due vatticini” (“Two tales are told”) duet in the opening scene. True, Verdi wrote “a voce aperta.” He didn’t mean that. To this usage, which brings with it a whiff of a German character role as dealt with too often these days, Kelsey adds an overlay of the Italian “baritone snarl” meant to signify Bad Guy that came into use c. 1940, built into some Italian voices of that era but sounding in his like “something of a put-on,” as I remarked in ’23. Between them, these stand-ins for interpretive inflection wear themselves out quickly, and leave precious little room for tonal beauty, nuance, or sustained line. He wasn’t just cool, though, like Davidsen. He worked away energetically, striving for effects, but always in the same way.